Here’s how to get your phone to make the ‘é’ in ‘Kiké Hernández’

An accent mark is useful for distinguishing Kiké Hernández’s harmless nickname from an offensive ethnic slur.

Using an acute accent (“é”) to indicate an “ay” sound is a convention from French, not Spanish, but English speakers will get the idea anyway.

All you have to do on an iPhone or Android is hold down the “e” key to get a menu of e’s with accent marks, including é.

Enrique Hernández, a utility player for the National League champion Los Angeles Dodgers, has a nickname, which is pronounced KEE-kay.

In English, when you see an acute accent (“é”) it’s usually an accent aigu in a French loanword.

“My fiancée knows Beyoncé, and she put that on her résumé,” is a sentence you might write if you were engaged to a name-dropper with a quirky way of applying for jobs.

In Spanish, the acute accent isn’t used like this.

An acute accent in Spanish indicates an irregularly stressed syllable, which is why the ‘a’ in ‘Hernández” gets one. There’s no irregular stress in Hernández’s nickname, and an ‘e’ at the end of a word would ordinarily be pronounced as ‘ay,’ so there’s no accent mark required. The proper way to write his nickname in Spanish is “Kike.”

But that’s not a great way to write it in English because … well, you know. So broadcasters and sports journalists have adopted a convention of giving Kiké an accent aigu, even though he’s not French, because doing so adds a little bit of clarity about pronunciation that’s good for everyone.

I think there are some baseball fans out there who would like to do this in their own social media posts, but don’t know how.

The internet really needs to work on making it easier to put an accent on Kike, because it’s very awkward without it… #Dodgers

Fortunately, it is already easy to type letters with accent marks on the internet! If you’re posting to Twitter or Facebook during Game 3 on Friday night, it is within your power to write “Kiké Hernández” in the same way the broadcasters do.

On an iPhone or an Android device, it’s super easy: just press down on the ‘e’ until a little menu pops up offering you é (and ë and ę and such), and then pick the appropriate accented character.

On a Mac computer, holding down the ‘e’ key will produce a similar menu. Once it pops up, hit the number 2 to get an é.